


New York's Alright (If You Like Saxophones)

by objectlesson



Category: Gargoyles (TV)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-10
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-25 16:16:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4967695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Broadway, Lex, and Brooklyn go to the Central Park Zoo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New York's Alright (If You Like Saxophones)

**Author's Note:**

> I think this story usurps my one Fantastic Mr. Fox fic as my strangest foray into any fandom? I don't care though, I LOVE gargoyles and I LOVE Lexington and Brooklyn's whole dynamic and find if perfectly slashy. Even if they're barely humanoid. 
> 
> This isn't technically pre-slash, but it doesn't have any kissing in it because I literally couldn't think of how to describe it, and I can't even really picture it because of Brooklyn's character design. That being said, its very slashy pre-slash. 
> 
> I struggled terribly over the title. It's a Fear song, about how New York is alright, if you like Saxophones. Or your buddy Brooklyn.

Lex shivered, wrapping his wings more tightly around himself as he hobbled along the paved walkway cutting through park. The grass looked grey in the moonlight, and even though it was only September, the wind cutting through the trees felt frigid. Central Park wasn’t just cold at night, it was downright _spooky_. Lex kept seeing shadows move in his peripheral vision, skittering like cockroaches away from light. He was probably imagining them, but still. He quickened his pace so that he could catch up with Broadway and Brooklyn, who were in the midst of a discussion so heated they didn’t seem to notice the chill, or the spookiness. 

“Captain Kirk is way cooler than Picard,” Broadway argued, throwing his arms up into the air. “Picard cares about the rules more than he cares about _justice_. But Kirk, Kirk breaks the rules if they’re unjust.” 

Brooklyn shrugged, pushing his sunglasses up onto his muzzle nonchalantly. Lex didn’t know why Brooklyn was wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night in Central Park, or if he really understood the purpose of sunglasses at all. Regardless, Lex kept looking at his own reflection in them, consequently forgetting that just because he couldn’t see Brooklyn’s eyes, didn’t mean Brooklyn couldn’t see him. He remembered, and looked away. 

“You’re totally wrong because you haven’t watched as much next Gen as I have,” Brooklyn explained. “Picard breaks the rules all the time. He just does it _effectively_ because he’s not a goon like Kirk.”

“Kirk is _not_ a goon! He’s a gentleman!” Broadway said, affronted. 

“Yeah, if by gentleman you mean womanizing creep. Plus, Picard has an accent. You just can’t beat that accent.” 

“Uh, guys,” Lex interrupted, poking his head in between Broadway and Brooklyn. “How much further is it to the zoo? I’m getting a little cold.” 

Brooklyn grinned, looking kind of delighted as he tried to reach for Lex and poke him in the ribs with his index claw. His sunglasses and resulting blindness made him miss though, and instead he just stumbled, swiping at the air. “Are you sure you’re not just _scared?_ It’s not gonna be any warmer at the zoo.” 

Lex made a face. He was irritated for being condescended to, but also irritated that Brooklyn didn’t succeed in jabbing him in the side. It was kind of pathetic, but he absolutely loved any and all attention from Brooklyn. Especially physical attention. He didn’t care if Brooklyn was teasing him or being mean, he still hung onto it, still pushed. It wasn’t something Lex particularly _liked_ about himself, it was just one of many indisputable facts, like that his skin was the color of green olives or that he was infuriatingly smaller than everyone else. 

“There will at least be _lights_ there, and buildings. The breeze sucks.” 

“Well you don’t have to put up with it much longer,” Broadway told him, pointing ahead to a paved plaza leading up to a trio of brick archways. There was a sign hanging above the centermost arch which read _Central Park Zoo_. Lex sighed, relieved. 

They caught an updraft and sailed over the fence, landing neatly beside a sprawling lawn flanked in habitats. Or at least, Broadway and Lex landed neatly. Brooklyn landed on top of a picnic table, which he toppled to the ground. “I meant to do that,” he said, righting it and smiling sheepishly over his shoulder at them. It was an unconvincing smile, and Lex was pretty sure Brooklyn didn’t even believe himself. He rolled his eyes, and plucked Brooklyn’s sunglasses from his face, knowing full well he was likely gonna get tackled for it. 

“Hey!” Brooklyn yelped, grabbing Lex around the waist and heaving him over, fighting him for his glasses. “Those are mine!” 

Lex grinned, flashing his incisors, writhing half-heartedly against in Brooklyn’s grip. “They’re called _sun_ glasses for a reason, you know.” 

Broadway stared at them, eyes wide, like he had never before considered the origin of such a word. Brooklyn went kind of limp. “I guess you’re right,” he said eventually, sighing and letting Lex go so he could stand and brush himself off. “They did always seem impractically _dark.”_

“You learn something new every night,” Broadway exclaimed, starting down the main pathway so he could examine the big, colorful map printed on a sandwich board. “Like that they have Snow Leopards at the Central Park Zoo!”

Broadway really wanted to see the snow leopards, so that’s where they decided to go. It was still cold but Lex felt considerably better about it because at least the zoo was less spooky than the park, and any moving shadows here could easily be attributed to animals. He also felt better about everything because his midsection was still kind of tingling from his impromptu wrestling match with Brooklyn over the glasses. For some reason it made him feel more _real_ or to have the memory of Brooklyn’s claws on him so fresh in his brain. He could stop feeling distracted by his urges to annoy Brooklyn to the point of tackling him if he was recently tackled. 

They passed a lot of animals on the way to the Snow Leopards that were not Snow Leopards, and Brooklyn had taken it upon himself to compare every single animal to someone they knew. “That one looks like Goliath,” he announced when they walked by the Rhino enclosure, where two rhinoceroses were chewing mouthfuls of hay and regarding them with mild irritation, like they _knew_ they were visiting after hours. 

“And that one looks like Xanatos,” he said, pointing to a baboon. 

“What about that parrot?” Broadway asked, pointing to a spectacularly colored Macaw, all red and and blues, nearly incandescent even in the darkness. “Can I be that parrot?” 

Brooklyn cocked his head, thinking about it very seriously for a moment. “Yeah, I guess. It’s kind of a fat parrot.” 

As they passed more and more enclosures, Lex started to get nervous about what zoo animal Brooklyn was inevitably going to say he looked like. The thing about Brooklyn was that when it was just the two of them, He was really _nice_ to Lex. When they were alone in the bell tower watching 80s horror movies and eating popcorn and getting stupidly scared while they laid on the straw pallet together, or playing Pac Man and losing over and over again because they didn’t actually understand the premise, or reading comics side by side and trading Pez he didn’t even try to act cool, or even tease Lex that much. They were just friends, equals even, and they could talk about all sorts of things Lex would normally feel stupid or shy talking about with anyone else. 

But when Broadway and the others were around, Brooklyn stopped being Lex’s friend and equal and started acting like his older brother or something. It was really annoying, mostly because Lex _knew_ that wasn’t really him. He knew Hellraiser made Brooklyn scream and hide his eyes with his arms, he knew Brooklyn only liked the green apple flavored mentos because the mint ones hurt his tongue because he was a baby. Lex knew Brooklyn wasn’t actually cool, which just made it all the more absurd when he _tried_ to be. 

Most troublesome of all was that Brooklyn seemed to think that the best way to appear cool to the rest of the clan was to give Lex a hard time. And maybe even more troublesome than that was Lex’s tendency to not only allow it, but _encourage_ it, because it usually resulted in them wrestling or tussling or at least spitting creative insults at each other, and even though that wasn’t the type of attention he would _prefer_ from Brooklyn, it was attention nonetheless, and Lex didn’t discriminate as much as he should. 

Sure enough, as they passed through the reptile room on their way to the snow leopards, Brooklyn spotted a very small and somewhat sick looking iguana curled up pitifully on top of a heat lamp and said, “Aw, look, it’s Lexington.” Then he clapped his palm down on top of Lex’s shoulder and shook him in a very patronizing fashion. 

Lex scowled, but he didn’t mind buckling under the pressure of Brooklyn’s claws. “I’m not _that_ little,” he complained, smacking Brooklyn away so obviously that Brooklyn had time to grab his wrist with his freehand and twist, almost knocking him down. He kind of hated himself for how thrilling it all felt. 

“Dunno, you’re pretty little. Like it’s a good thing we didn’t come here during the day, otherwise a zookeeper might have mistaken you for an escaped lizard and stuck you in a cage.” 

“Guys,” Broadway groaned. “Come on. I want to see the snow leopards and it’s already past two.” 

Lex and Brooklyn followed, elbowing each other all the while. Lex was a little bit dizzy over it, even though he _had_ just been compared to a sick iguana. 

On the way out of the reptile room they passed through the primate enclosures, followed by a hundred pairs of wide, glowing yellow eyes. Lex shivered, disturbed by being watched so intently, but Brooklyn walked right up to the fence and pressed his face to it, peering right back at them. “Look, it’s Lex again!” he declared, pointing at a very fluffy looking lemur hanging onto the gate and regarding them, its tail curled around the wire for balance. It was one of the least tough looking animals Lex has ever seen. 

An iguana was one thing, but this was ridiculous. Lex crossed his arms, glowering. “How do I look like a lemur?!” 

“Because you’re weird and have giant eyeballs,” Brooklyn explained very matter of factly. Then he flicked Lex in the center of his chest with his thumb and fore claw, flashing his incisors. 

The night continued as such. Brooklyn likened every single undignified or ugly or embarrassing animal they passed to Lex, so enthusiastically that Broadway joined in, too. By the time they actually made it to the snow leopards, Lex had been compared to a ocelot, a fennec fox, a porcupine, a kangaroo rat, and a dung beetle. Broadway and Brooklyn were positively in stitches, doubled over at the waist and laughing so hard they were wheezing. Lex would have had more than enough of them, if Brooklyn hadn’t also spent a considerable amount of time shoving him, hanging on him, and lifting him up over his head in both hands to demonstrate how very tiny and lemur-like he actually was. Lex only half-wished he had the self-respect to fight back in any real or convincing fashion. 

They stood outside the snow leopard enclosure, and Lex was a mess of confusion and weird, roiling nausea. He wanted to be mad, and kind of was, but he was also still reeling from how _focused_ on him Brooklyn was, even if it was a less than fun kind of focus. He thought about how nice it was to just lie on the straw pallet with Brooklyn, claws greasy from popcorn and sides pressed flush together while they sang the ending credits to Friday the 13th Part IV. He thought about it, and thought wistfully about how much he preferred that kind of attention to noogies and jokes at his expense. 

Broadway was having some weird transcendental moment with the snow leopards, so they left him alone for a minute so he could get all teary eyed about how much they probably missed the snow. They walked side by side down a pathway together, shoulders bumping tensely. A silence fell heavy between them, and Brooklyn was acting weird and awkward since there was no one to impress anymore, just Lex standing there, tiny and green and undignified like an iguana. They stood quietly in front of the hyena enclosure, wordlessly watching a hyena with a shock of white hair down the back of her neck chew anxiously on a giant bone. “It kind of looks like you,” Lex said eventually, wanting it to come out scathing but realizing it couldn’t, because he wasn’t actually angry, not really. Plus, the hyena looked cool, so comparing it to Brooklyn wasn’t even an insult. 

“I think I’m more of a cheetah kind of guy,” Brooklyn said eventually, side-eying Lex. 

“Nah. They’re too skinny and scraggly.” 

“It seems like you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what zoo animal I look most like,” Brooklyn crossed his arms tightly after he said it, like he realized it was a weird thing to say too late and wanted to protect himself physically from being called out on it. 

Lex felt hot all over, hot and kind of dizzy, the wind from earlier in the evening long forgotten. “Yeah,” was all he could think to say. It felt like a confession, but he didn’t know _what_ he was confessing, what he was revealing by admitting he _did_ devote a lot of thought to stupid things involving Brooklyn. Still, Brooklyn reached out awkwardly and put his arm around Lex’s shoulders, and they stood like that for a minute, stiff and strange and sweating. 

Lex thought of all the times he saw Goliath doing the same thing to Elisa, place his arm around her waist absentmindedly as he helped her down the stairs of the bell tower or whatever, and how Elisa always narrowed her eyes when it happened, like she was steeling herself against some kind of disappointment. For some reason, thinking about that made him sad, so he stopped doing it. Plus it seemed like an absurd thing to think about in this moment, while he stood under the weight of Brooklyn’s arm at the Central Park Zoo pretending to watch a hyena eat a bone.

Brooklyn cleared his throat after a minute and said, “I uh, hope you didn’t take it personally. All the animals, I mean. It was just a joke.” 

Lex shrugged, and the motion felt weird and trapped under the heat of Brooklyn’s arm, broad and heavy. Still, he didn’t move it, and Lex was grateful for that. “I didn’t take it personally. But, you never joke like that when we’re alone. So it seems kind of...fake,” he finished lamely. 

“Well yeah,” Brooklyn said, a defensive note in his voice. “It’s different when Broadway is around.” 

“Um, why?” Lex asked. 

The silence stretched on for a few seconds, and Lex was sure Brooklyn was going to stop touching him any second, let his arm fall down to his side or maybe move it in favor of pinching him or pulling his ear or something else equally mean, but he didn’t. Instead, he eventually said, “Dunno. Just is.” They stood in silence until another hyena ambled up, sniffing the ground and tiptoeing up beside the other, where it collapsed, head pillowed upon the other’s mane of white hair, into which is nuzzled. “Hey, it’s you,” Brooklyn whispered, so as to not disturb the hyenas. 

“The hyena? Why? 

“Because it’s little, but lithe and strong and cute at the same time.” 

“Cute?” Lex asked skeptically, side-eying Brooklyn, trying to catch his gaze and failing. 

“Yeah,” Brooklyn said firmly without looking down, tightening his grip on Lex’s shoulder and dragging him decidedly closer. “Totally cute.” 

Lex swallowed, mouth suddenly very dry, cheeks suddenly very hot.“So those hyenas are us?” he mused, internally beaming.

“Yup.” 

“Cool.” 

They stood like that for a long time, until they heard Broadway’s heavy footfalls on the pavement, approaching from the snow leopard enclosures. Brooklyn dropped his arm sharply, letting go of Lex and slouching against the railing outside the hyena pens, probably attempting to look cool. Lex rolled his eyes, but he didn’t actually care too much. He was still kind of swooning.

“Let’s go, you guys,” Broadway huffed, still wiping tears with his claws. “I cant tell if the zoo is really cool, or really sad.” 

On the way home, Broadway and Brooklyn resumed their debate over which captain was better, and Lex hung back behind them so that neither could see nor make fun of the terrific impossibility of his smile: bright, fanged, and hyena-wide.


End file.
